THE HAVEN UNDER THE HILL 237

drainage system another bagatelle, and, of course, we
must lay out the garden There shall be terraces
retained by the delightful grey stone from the quarries
at Cothill nearby The terraces must run like bastions
all along the south side of the house, all manner of
rock plants must be set in the crevices between the
stones, and below the terraces there will be a series of
little orchards, all enclosed in a hornbeam hedge which
will serve as a screen shutting off the kitchen garden a
green screen in summer and a brown one in winter
We must get together collections of trees and flowering
shrubs against the time when the ground is ready for
planting And so to work Of course in those days no
builder could give an exact estimate of cost, but what
did that matter? We were going to live a simple life
in a barn and that couldn't prove expensive The
barn was taken down from the place in Herefordshire
in which it had lived for so many centuries, put on
rail, each timber numbered, and brought in safety to
Boar's Hill There in the field the great beams lay
exposed to all weathers whilst the foundations of the
house were being dug One of the leading ladies of
Boar's Hill saw them there "Oh! my dear Professor,"
she cried, "do you know that all that lovely wood is
lying rotting in your field What are you going to do
about it?" "Live in it," said the Professor Then began
the work of erection The great beams, hard as iron,
must have the sap wood hacked off them Carpenters
came and blunted then- tools and left, relays of them,
without making any impression on the beams, until at
last the resourceful Imrie brought ship*s carpenters from
Southampton to hack off the sap wood and shape the
beams All through the rainless summer of 1921 the
work went on, and at last the great gaunt framework
was all in place Visitors came, even from Oxford, to
see the strange monster which reared itself up like the
whitening bones of some stranded whale's skeleton
One of the visitors, Sir Walter Raleigh, to be lost all too
soon by Oxford and the world, gave praise which